Conventional electrophotographic copiers are stand-alone machines that receive documents from users, either individually or in bulk, and photocopy these on an immediate basis. Copies are dispensed directly from the machine as they are produced. If multiple copies have been printed, these must be individually distributed to their recipients, some of whom may be physically located far from the machine.
The advent of high-speed scanners and laser printers has opened the possibility of using computational resources to automate the printing process. A document need only be scanned into digital form a single time; it is saved as a file on a print server (or, more typically, on a file-server computer accessible to the print server via a network) and transmitted by the print server to the selected printer in a format readable by its print engine.
Digitally represented or imaged documents (“digital documents”) may also be sent to destinations other than local printers, e.g., to other network-connected users via local e-mail, or to an Internet server for remote distribution or printing on a remote printer. An interface as described in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 20010035972 of Wurmfeld, entitled “Adaptive interface for digital printing systems” can be used to select a destination for a digital document. However, such an arrangement involves addressing the digital document to a destination which complicates the task of transporting the digital document in that it requires further input data from the user to provide the destination address as well as knowledge of the appropriate destination address for that document. The digital document addressed in this manner is still tied to a network rather than being in a transportable form (such as paper). Also persons who need access to the digital document must have access to the destination network and such access can complicate or hamper the transportability of the digital document. Similar problems were addressed in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 20030084105 of Wiley et al., entitled “Methods for providing a remote document history repository and multifunction device,” in which delivery data for sent documents is stored on a network device that is remote from a scanner.
U.S. Patent Application Publication 2002/0054362 of Chen, entitled “Paperless image fax-scanning apparatus,” describes a fax machine that scans and faxes documents, and which can also store the data of scanned documents on a floppy disc or other memory device for further processing.
Techniques for supplying optical discs for use in downstream processes (such as packaging and disc duplication) are known in the art, but none have been adapted either structurally or communicatively for use in a copier machine to solve the problems recognized by the present inventor.
For mechanisms that supply optical discs from stacks, see EP-B-0-067 073; U.S. Pat. No. 5,788,114 of Perego, and in particular the mechanism 100 described in connection with FIG. 10 thereof; and U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,718,559 and 5,692,878, both of Freund. Each of these designs is constructed with certain considerations in mind, the '878 patent, for example, providing an arrangement that permits a compact device with a low physical height and secure handling of the CDs in an automated environment.